EricWiberg

I don't think that I can do any better on the dolphin pair, if only for the reason that the very fine details are lost in the resin casting... and you would need a magnifying glass in hand to get close enough to the master carvings to even see those details. You may notice that the left hand dolphin is getting some dental work (done after I made a test resin casting), as the mouth structure didn't quite match the right hand dolphin. I have a little bit of cleanup work to do, but I won't get carried away. I made these resin castings before I started the mouth surgery on the left hand dolphin, just to see if the were close enough to be twins. These are straight from the casting mould with no cleanup or detailing - I simply wanted to see the Big Picture. I think they are close enough that I can start making a bunch of castings this weekend, and it will likely take several days to clean up the 20+ pairs of dolphins that will be needed to flank the upper gun deck ports. I also have several dozen fluer de lis resin castings, as I mull over exactly how I want to use them on the bulwarks. I am thinking it may be as straightforward as a mass of fleur de lis as seen on the Royal Duc....

I settled on a dolphin carving that I can live with. The very small curved wood gouges arrived and they did allow me to make very fine curves on the tail fins. However... even in 0.75mm thick styrene sheet, those very fine fins were way too fragile, They broke while unmoulding, they broke while removing the resin casting from the mould, etc. The fins were strong enough at 1.0mm styrene sheet thickness, but that was getting too thick and out of scale for what I wanted. I made the tail section and the fins a little thicker for strength, and now are they strong enough for the moulding and casting process using 0.75mm thick sheet. This is the first resin cast, not cleaned up yet. So now to finish the left hand dolphin, and then I can start making 25 or so sets of dolphins for the upper gun deck gun ports.

I have patiently carved eleven different dolphins, and I think that the one on the copper penny is just about what I want. The two above the penny were iterations #8 and #9... for some reason, I really liked the look of the carved wooden furniture dolphin below, specifically the big lips! The dolphin on the penny needs some clean up work; I was very frustrated at my ability to make nice, thin, sweeping curves of the tail fins - see iterations #8 and #9! However, I discovered that a very small woodworking gouge that has a shallow curve could allow me to do a much better job than with my #11 Xacto blade. I currently have a 4mm wide shallow curve gouge, and I am patiently waiting for the delivery of several smaller gouges: 1.5mm, 2mm, and 3mm. I know that will allow me to finish off the tail with nice, long fins as I visualized in my drawing, and also thin the body. I also want to add texture on the head ala the "mane" on my drawing and where the small pectoral fin is be in the drawing. I experimented with Apoxie Sculpt, and the tiniest ball of maybe 1mm flattens out into an oval, and lets me mark some very fine striations in it - much easier for me than attempting that in plastic. So I just have to be patient until the gouges arrive later this week.

I just realized that I shouldn't even bother glueing the masters to wood! I redid a bathroom last year, and I have some leftover tile that is very smooth... that is what I need to glue the masters to.

Taking Marc's suggestion to heart (dolphin head should face the gun port, tail flaring away), I went back to the vellum paper for sketching and ended up with this... After scanning the drawing into my computer, I just went into Word and shrank the drawing to a square 8mm x 8mm, then printed out some tiny dolphins that I glued to 1mm thick Evergreen sheet.I then perforated around the tiny dolphin with a very small drill bit, and with a bit of filing, got this for my right side of gun port dolphin (this is my second attempt at a right hand dolphin)... I also cut some blanks out for a left side dolphin, but I finished the right side first.. It took me 4-5 tries on the left side dolphin, as I just couldn't get a result that looked close to a mirror image... until I flipped the left side over and worked on it while it was laying next to the completed right side dolphin.. it was much easier for my brain to "see". Finally, I ended up with this pair that I am mostly satisfied with... I could continue to tweak and try again, but I reassured myelf that this is the view that people will see if they get their eyes within six inxhes of the ship (however, I may add the tiniest piece of clay behind the head of the left hand dolphin if I am not satisfied with the resin copies). It is interestng how just changing the position of the camera angle very slightly can make them look a lot different! And now the great reveal of the moulds.... ugg. Not happy. I will try making resin copies from these just to see, but I think I made a mistake glueing the pieces to a rough piece of wood (a cheap shim!). Notice the mould body doesnt want to release cleanly. Hmmm... maybe I can sand around the pieces to smooth the wood a bit, and then coat the wood surface with a very thin cyano acrylate to seal the surface? Suggestions welcome, as I think if I try and pry off the pieces, I will ruin them...

Marc, I did drill perforation holes around the first one (the one in the picture below). I just tried a second one without perforation, and it didn't do well. By "abut", do you mean the tail should be a little more to the left? This is as close as I can get the dolphin without butting up against the (future) gun port tackles

Well, I wouldn't call my latest 180 degree turn a reversal.. I would simply call it listening to someone with a lot more experience at this than me! While I thought that I would glue the hulls together, paintt the hulls, and then add the decorations.... Marc LaGuardia has suggested that glueing on all of the decorations first, painting the hull, and then painting all of the indiviual decorations is the way to go. And that makes sense, especially from a glue smear standpoint, and all of the tiny scraping that I would have to do to apply the decor. So.... onto the decorations. 1) rear bulwarks and beakhead bulkhead will display a field of fluer de lis, and I have molds on hand 2) upper gun deck gun ports will be bracketed by dolphins 3) middle gun deck ports will have "trophies of war" spaced in between them. I decided to try a dolphin first; I will need a mirror image pair to make resin molds of. I drew a dolphin on vellum after finding lots of "dolphins on French furniture" pictures. I wanted a large head and a slender body, and I liked the wood carving with oversized lips (duck lips?!). I took the drawing and scanned it, then was able to make tiny little prints that measured 8mm tall... the vertical height of the upper deck gun ports. . I decided to try 0.5mm thick sheet fr the first go around, and glued the little prints to the Evergreen sheet stock. So far, maybe so good. Very fragile but nothing has broken so far... After about 90 minutes of very gentle cutting, filing, and scraping... I am satisfied with my first attempt; I know that Marc and others have said in their logs that the trick is to create some texture that catches the light. I know that my second carving will be better than the first, and the third better than the second, and so on.... I have also made moulds for the trophies of war that I had cut out from the quarter galleries fully a year ago (before I completely changed course with the high sheer wales). However, oops... some of the trophies of war will be too big to fit in between the wales. Sigh....... I may end up also creating some trophies of war that are small enough to fit in between the wales! It's only time, right? So hopefully my carving skills will improve with practice, as I am looking at a lot of intricate carving over the next several months!

Well, that went well... the card template fits as well as I can make it fit right now. Guess I can take a deep breath and next step is... glue the hull together. Whew - started down this beakhead bulkhead/head redesign process on Dec 27.... I did miss 5 weeks of ship time in March/April, so it has only been three months, not four.... The one observation that I have is that I was hoping to make the head look a little longer and lower than it is. It is clearly longer than the kit, but - and here is just another one of many compromises that must be made - I opted to capture the 40 degree steeve of the bowsprit for a 1660-70 period ship. Or, I could have stayed with a steeve of 31-32 and I would have my lower head, but not an accurate bowsprit angle!

So... hopefully my next post will be showing cardboard templates of head rails... but first..... I needed to trim down the top surface of the upper knee. Note the cardboard template is much thinner than the current styrene version as it tapers on its run to the back of the figurehead (I cut the cardboard template off where the base of the figurehead sits on the lower knee for ease of use). The hair bracket is lightly sketched in... it will be 5mm in width at the stem and will taper to 1-2mm in width by the time it reaches the base of the figurehead. However, the top edge of the upper knee needs to: 1) duplicate the curve of the hair bracket and 2) have an even 2mm rise above the hair bracket curve. This 2mm rise above the hair bracket will support the head rail support brackets... BIG thanks to Marc LaGuardia for helping me to understand this relationship! So... I am going to start making cardboard templates of the top head rail, and go from there. I do have to consider the perspective of my sketch, though, as the sketch is only 2-dimensional, and the distance from the top of the beakhead bulkhead to the rosette is a straight line 100mm in length. However, in the 3-dimensional world of the model, the straight line length is 120mm or so, as indicated by the needle file. So maybe I just have to make a copy of my sketch, and lengthen it by 20% to lengthen the head rail? Regardless, I expect there will be a lot of trial and error here, but this is a required and critical step. Once the knees and the head rails and the fifurehead all fit perfectly... then the hull can be glued together. That sort of scares me, as that means painting is coming, and that will be a whole new learning experience!

We shall see, Marc... but I am certainly glad that I finally took your observations about drawing/creating on vellum to heart. I had made rough sketches of the head structure based on measurements from various VDV drawings. Now, as I draw on the vellum to try and be precise to the millimeter, it turns out that after scanning the hull and head structure onto vellum and cross-checking the proportions... I lucked into the exact head structure proportions that I was trying to achieve. However, that was mostly luck! There is no way that I could attempt to make the head rails and support brackets without having a very good drawing. And... gee, have you heard me say this before? - it turned out to be one heck of a lot easier than I assumed! Here are several of the head structures that I was trying to emulate... especially Royal Duc, the little sister. After looking at some of these Dutch ships, it seemed that there heads were plain and not dressed up. I was wondering if SR 1671 might be "staid and conservative"" in that respect.However, Royal Duc (and Royal Louis) seem to be taking the approach that any area is a good area for Baroque. Since SR 1671 was intended to showcase the magnificence of Louis 14... well, Royal Duc has a lot going on with the head and the beakhead bulkhead, so SR 1671 must be at comparable..

In order to create card templates for my head rails, I need a precise pattern. I finally got around to drawing on vellum. I scanned in the ship hull and new head parts that I created, and then saved than scan. I then printed it on vellum directly from the printer, and I had a pretty good template. It took me several hours of measuring and drawing with French curves after looking at a number of VDV drawings to try and capture that "older" type of Dutchy head rail. I was satisfied with the somewhat finished drawing on the right. There - I had the basis to start cutting head rail card templates! Except... something wasn't quite right... I laid the hull on the vellum drawing for a final check... and it was off. I discovered that my vellum drawing was 4.9% smaller than the original... that sounds small, but it was plenty big enough to create seemingly huge errors! I rescanned again, and got the same result?? I checked Google, and apparently "minor" scan size errors are not uncommon; it suggested a few minor fixes. The print on the left is now exactly the same size as the original scanned drawing.... so I will print the drawing on the left on vellum, and draw the head railings again.

OK, the fit is so much better with this stem padding. On to the head rails... Note to self. In the future, make sure polystyrene work doesn't have to be flexed to fit into place... it should fit without stress/strain, if possible.

My goal of building as much of the "from scratch" head structure in advance and to also have a precise fit is not going to work with my current stem padding piece. I wanted to make the stem thicker, a uniform 5mm thick when viewed from the side, and 6mm wide when viewed from the front. I also created slots that match the kit openings in the hull, so the tabs on the head pieces lock into the hull. The problem is that I built a straight piece that needs to be flexed to the curve of the stem; it fits perfectly, but pushes like a spring so I simply cannot get the head structure to sit nice and tight (at least without glue, but I can't glue yet). So I need a curved stem padding piece that fits with no bending stress/strain. Back to the drawing board. I scanned the hull to get the precise shape of the stem. Then a card template was made and affixed to 2mm thick thick styrene and it was drilled out. After wasting away the excess and then some sanding, the new stem padding piece fits precisely with no bending/flexing required. Now I just need to follow the same process and make several other curves so I can laminate them together to make a 6mm wide piece (viewed fore to aft). Now, the head piece tabs will insert through the padding into the hull, where I can use small clamps on the tabs to hold them firmly on the inside. So maybe 2 steps forwards, and now one back.... but I will get much better results as I create the head structure.

Well, the rough scribing of the port side of the knee of the head is done... just some cleaning up amd prettying up is required. I used two techniques to scribe: 1) a Tamiya scriber against French curves, and 2) Marc's technique using a very sharp blade to score the styrene. Both techniques produce excellent results; if I couldn't clamp a French curve to use as an edge, I was very comfortable in using Marc's technique. And I have to say again, this was another example of scratch building on this kit that I was initially a tad bit worried about - "can I actually do this?" - and with patience and the right tools and advice from experienced builders like Marc... it was so much easier than I expected... and fun!

Marc's taper explanation above really helped... in simple terms for my mind, it means that even though the curve of the cutwater viewed from the side may be a curve 6" long, the ocean sees the frontal view, and the curve now appears to be a simple straight piece only 4" top to bottom, but the taper must appear even as Marc drew. I also tried to evenly plane down the thickness from leading edge back to the stem... Next, I monkeyed around for an hour penciling and erasing and finally came up on a joinery/scarf joint pattern that looks plausible- to me! Now... the fun part comes... the actual scribing. The only way - with my resources- that I can do this is to clamp the French Curves that made the lines directly to the knee of the head piece so I have an edge to scribe against. No way I could ever scribe freehand without an edge! As soon as I finish a particular scribe on one side, I will immediately flip the piece over and reclamp and scribe the companion line...